Captain America

In this post from 2009, the Acephalous blog (which really dislikes comics writer Mark Millar) discusses the absurdity of a recently thawed out Captain America in a Millar story tossing off a line like “Surrender? Do you think this letter on my head stands for France?”
Acephalous is quite right. When Cap went into suspended animation, the French weren’t seen as surrender monkeys; they were the heroic Resistance, fighting against the Vichy government (not entirely an accurate portrayal, but certainly no more inaccurate than the surrender-monkey image). So why would a newly-defrosted Cap start quoting Bush-era jokes about our allies? (“Do you think it stands for appeasement?” I could buy).
But then, it’s not as if Cap has ever really been portrayed as a young man of the 1930s (probaby about 23 or 24 when he went into the ice and froze) carried forward in time, has he? This is a guy born in the 1920s, a time when bigotry toward blacks, Jews and Catholics was commonplace, and he’s comfortable with all of them. He treats women as equals and has never shown any signs of hostility or discomfort toward gays.
Conversely, for a guy who spent four years in a war where the Russians were our allies and then slept clear through the McCarthyite witch-hunts, he’s throwing around Cold War rhetoric about the “Reds” very shortly after thawing out back in the sixties (even given that plenty of Americans were anti-Communists back in the 1930s).
Cap, in a sense, has always adapted to the America of the day. In the fifties (now retconned as a Captain America wannabe) and sixties, he was anti-Communist and pro-freedom; by the end of the decade, it was emphasized he was pro Civil Rights when he took on his black partner, the Falcon. As more groups won their civil rights, the more pro-equality Cap has become (this reminds me of an excellent story arc in John Ostrander’s Spectre, in which the Ghostly Guardian explores the way the definition of America now includes equality for women, Jews, gays and others). In the seventies, post-Watergate, he grappled with the idea of corruption and evil threatening America from within, rather from without, another appropriate theme.
In all these cases, he approaches the issues more as an idealized American image of the present, rather than a man of his time. Not that I have a problem with that: Unrealistic though it may be, I’d have to have Marvel’s symbol of America suggesting blacks should stay at the back of the bus.
What’s different with the Millar bit is that Cap’s never been an avatar for America’s more er, muscular foreign policy under Reagan or more recently Bush. In that sense, he’s remained true to his WWII roots: Go out, fight the evil, come home. Even so, I don’t really think Millar’s anachronism was more absurd than anyone else’s (I don’t much like his writing, but that’s a separate issue).
It might be interest sometime to explore a Cap analog who is a man of his times: A New Deal Democrat plunked into a world where his once radical positions are now somewhat right of center (a man who believes in equal rights for blacks might still be floored to have a black man in the White House). Would he come off as a villain? A hero willing to adapt? Or something else?
Hmm …